


doppelganger

by oonaseckar



Series: llude sing cuccu [1]
Category: Avengers (Comics), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men (Original Timeline Movies), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Doppelganger, Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, F/M, False Identity, Gen, Identity, Identity Issues, Identity Reveal, Impersonation, M/M, Mistaken Identity, Secret Identity, Secret Identity Fail
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-08
Updated: 2020-03-08
Packaged: 2021-01-25 12:59:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21356629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oonaseckar/pseuds/oonaseckar
Summary: Erik is Professor Xavier's head of security. His enforcer. And oh, has been hopelessly in love with him for the past four years. Except that Xavier doesn't exist: andhas neverexisted.
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier, Moira MacTaggert/Charles Xavier
Series: llude sing cuccu [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1670242
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	1. dream delivers us to dream

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter title by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

"The word is that you act as Professor Xavier's _enforcer_. Would you care to comment on that?"

Moira MacTaggert sparkled up at Erik, smirking in a way that she had to know had the recipient wondering just how much force it would take, to tighten the silver chain around her neck until her eyes boggled, until she made cat-like hissing noises.

They were walking through the subterranean tunnel leading to the venue's dressing rooms, as he escorted the award-winning NYT reporter to her pre-event interview with Charles.

Cheeky _bitch_.

"I'm the Professor's head of security," Erik answered, tight-lipped. "How you choose to characterise that is up to you. In any case, your appointment, and this proposed interview are with him, not his support staff, Miss McTaggert. Not so?"

There was a greenish tint to the underground lighting, and that local government/schoolly smell of plasticky floor-tiles and floor-polish. It made Erik feel like a blinking near-sighted mole. But none of it managed to dim _her _glowing beauty, he thought bitterly.

Which no doubt -- oh, the matter was _scarcely _in doubt -- Charles would profoundly appreciate.

It didn't help, when she rested a beautifully manicured hand on his arm, as they turned the final corner to reach the row of dressing-rooms.


	2. llude sing cuccu!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Erik's POV of their essential dilemma.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from _summer is icumen in_, trad folk song.

I'm in love with someone who doesn't exist, _has never_ existed. It isn't as if I don't know what kind of a fool that makes me. Not just on a parallel with celebrity stalkers, and women who write letters to imprisoned murderers. No, _less able _to control myself, and my id and my weak desires than _that_.

But I think I can be excused, for the period before things were made clear to me. The time between when he grabbed me out of a freezing sea, and the moment I put a bullet in him and destroyed us and any chance we had... I think of it as a madness. A madman has to be forgiven all things, since he can't understand punishment. I knew not what I did.

Though I'd have done it all anyway.

Being in love was wonderful, unexpected. Brutes are the worst sentimentalists, la de da and _can we just skate over this part? _I was a fool all on my own, with an audience to mock me, when I thought I was loved, too. I was sucking down air like it was wine all the time, everything was magical, _drunk quite drunk_ no matter how sober, for that period. I thought it had all changed for me, that my happy end had come.

I got an end, though. We all get an end. It came with a bullet, so you might say.


	3. i am gifted at blending myself into any given milieu

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Erik has been lied to. Oh, I wonder how that feels?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is Donna Tartt, The Secret History. Accept no imitations! No wooden nickels, bud.

Oh, you want the Cliff Notes version? I was plucked out of the sea: by one Charles Xavier. Lucky, no? One might have thought so. Saved, against my will, and very quickly I was in love with him. We allied ourselves, in a greater mutant cause, or so I thought. Until we found ourselves a point of conflict, and I had to fight him while loving him all the more. 

But I never meant to do him harm. I didn't mean to shoot him.

And then, when I did, Raven revealed herself.

Because -- you see, and you probably see it much quicker than I did -- what a blasted fool -- there never was a Charles Xavier. Never had been one. I had the whole story out of her -- sick at heart, but my eyes dry. In front of her, at least. 

She had entered the Xavier house as a cuckoo -- as a kid. It was a cold, lifeless, childless place, Sharon Xavier's dried-up womb having never dropped a kid. Probably her eggs froze from the ice. 

No, Raven -- my lady Mystique, my leader, _mein Fuhrer_ \- oh, Gods, I must cease with that -- she made him up out of whole cloth, withno template. She thought a boy would be better, you see? A handsome, Caucasian, WASPy, brilliantly gifted, casually charming boy. Such a boy would never be disinherited. He would be showered with wealth -- with power.

So, Charles Xavier -- 'Charles Xavier- was loaded with funds, and becoming a leader in the mutant cause, when she -- Mystique -- met me.

The bullet forced the revelation of her true self -- she could not hold the pose under such injury. But at least she was not paralysed. Or in fact, temporarily she was: but her gift dealt with that, put it right.)

I'd been fooled, I'd been taken. I'd loved a creation without life of its own: but at least there was still the cause.

***

After that she felt a little sorry for me. She'd known of my infatuation: I hadn't realised I'd been so transparent. And she took me into her bed: but it wasn't at all what I'd wanted. Sometimes I would try to get her to be Charles again. Still in love with him, you see: although he didn't exist.

And I tried not to hate her. She was basically benevolent, but contemptuous of human relationships. What were they, compared to the cause? Easy for her to say: she's a god, but mortal. With only finite time to change things and make them better, make mutants whole and free. She disapproved of my obsession: thought I shouldn't, in any case be wasting time on personal relationships. Not with my impressive and useful gifts. God rot them.

But after eight years she's pleased with me. I have served her well of late. Depression makes for a very devoted servant, you know. No personal life, no joy, nothing else to focus on.

So she has rewarded me. Last night she summoned me to her hotel room: and revealed to me that yes.

Yes. What I have always felt - stubbornly refused to stop _feeling_, though I couldn't _believe_ it -- is true. There was an original Charles.

It was almost worse to think that, for a minute, and she laughed to see my face. "I didn't kill him!" No, she had moulded his mind. That was all.

Because he was human, and useless to the cause. A sad sweet little rich kid who befriended her, and was having a horrible time with his stepfather Kurt.

So what did Lady Mystique do? Why, she fixed minds -- so many minds, molded like Pla-Doh! -- to put him with a loving human family, to change his name.

"Anyway," she said to me, quite casual. "I'm tired of your continued whiny maudlin meandering fixation with this little human. You may as well meet the original, get it out of your system."

***

And now, I stand on a doorstep, in a pleasant suburb of Philadelphia. Trembling.

I have knocked, already. Too loudly. The door opens.

(He isn't called Charles, now. He's... Conor? I cannot think of him as Conor.)

Oh, the door opens. 

Raven didn't get the fixing of plastic child bone structure quite right, to produce her adult version: there is a slightly straighter nose, different freckles, the eyes more blue/less blue. (More human. The shade was too unearthly before.)

But still, basically, Charles. I have read everything in the file. It's still him. Still who I dreamed into being, with Mystique's sly assistance. The personality is right. He's still a professor. And his friends have always told him he looks like Xavier, the mutant leader.

And now, he has a terrorist on his doorstep. In love with him.


End file.
